PHILADELPHIA—When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president tonight, she will have been a household face in national politics for nearly a quarter of a century—a full generation. In November, there will be millions of first-time presidential voters eligible to cast ballots for her who had yet to be born when she became First Lady. In fact, there will be millions of second-time voters who weren’t alive then, too.

To put it yet another way: on that memorable night in San Francisco in 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro accepted the nomination as Walter Mondale’s running mate and became the first female nominee on a major party’s national ticket, she was precisely 24 years removed from John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech. Win or lose, it is already Clinton’s triumph, and burden, to have made the unimaginable inevitable.

In 1992, when Clinton first insisted, “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” and allowed that, “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas,” the most popular movies included Scent of a Woman, Basic Instinct, and A Few Good Men. The U.S. Department of Transportation introduced a new slogan: “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”

It is Clinton’s overriding challenge, amid an angry year when change once again seems to be trumping more of the same, to persuade voters that she has a clear and compelling vision for a future that will be better than the past. Or as Bill Clinton put it in his tender biographical encomium to her in the Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday night, “So people say, well, we need to change. She’s been around a long time. She sure has—and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better.”

Related Video: NomiNation, Ep. 7; Give the People What They Want

For a reporter who covered Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns and White House years, being in Philadelphia this week has been like finding oneself inside a time warp. Again. There’s Vernon Jordan—older, slower, but still ferociously elegant. There’s Madeleine Albright, her signature jeweled pins gleaming. There’s Bruce Lindsey, Bill’s longtime consigliere, and Maggie Williams, Hillary’s White House chief of staff. And there’s Chelsea Clinton, then a 12-year-old with braces on her teeth and now a poised and polished 36-year-old mother of two who will introduce her own mother from the stage tonight.

Yes, there have been political dynasties—the Adamses, Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Bushes—in national life. But there has never been anything quite like the Clintons for sheer prominence and dominance at the top of presidential politics. Even Richard Nixon had only been in public life for 22 years before he won the presidency in 1968.

And like Nixon, Clinton has been at pains this week to prove to a skeptical press and public that there is a new version of herself, or at least an old one that nobody really quite knows. Like the diligent, disciplined lawyer she is, she has produced a string of character witnesses—from a badly burned survivor of the 9/11 attacks to a onetime sex-trafficking victim from Indonesia to the mothers of victims of police shootings—to testify to her career-long commitment to helping others.

Her chief witness, of course, was Bill Clinton himself, whose love for the woman he first met in the Yale Law School library 45 years ago still shines through (even if he has sometimes had a funny way of showing it over the years). Noticeably thinner, frailer, and a bit raspier on the cusp of 70, the former president had the delegates squarely in the palm of his hand as he made his case. “Now, how does this square?” Clinton asked after summing up his wife’s years of work on behalf of women and children, the disabled, and the down on their luck. “How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican Convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up. You just have to decide. You just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans. The real one had done more positive change-making before she was 30 than many public officials do in a lifetime in office.”

Not so much as a stray catcall from disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters greeted the former president’s summation in the hall. But persuading general-election voters, especially the comparatively tiny sliver of undecided ones who may still be open to Clinton’s appeal, will be another challenge altogether.

Nearly 7 in 10 voters tell pollsters that they don’t believe Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Her distrust of the media that will help circulate (and also filter) her message is ingrained and profound. Even one of her oldest friends and supporters on hand this week told me she would probably run the most secretive presidential administration in American history.

Asked if Clinton’s own sometimes defensive posture might be partly to blame for the public’s impressions of her, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, punted. “Well, people psychoanalyze that all the time,” he said at a breakfast sponsored by Bloomberg News. “I think that she herself has said she is not the kind of natural politician her husband was—is—or that Barak Obama is. She is a more private person, I guess. . . . But I think she has changed over time. She is a much more effective candidate now. I think that she was even in 2008 or even than she was at the beginning of this cycle. She has drawn strength and listened to people and I think carried those stories forward.”

It is a paradox that Clinton’s trust deficit has often been caused by own defensiveness about her defender in chief, whether in the murk of Whitewater or in the Monica Lewinsky affair. In the most important matters of public policy, she has much more often been forthright, a point Bill Clinton made when he said that the “real” Hillary “has earned the loyalty, the respect, and the fervent support of people who have worked with her in every stage of her life, including leaders around the world who know her to be able, straightforward and completely trustworthy.”
Clinton’s fate this fall rests in large measure on whether she can persuade not only the faithful here in Philadelphia that that is so, but also the doubters listening in places like the rest of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio.